so, whose charming cup is only virtue, which she bears in her hand to those who are worthy; (the rest are cheated with a thick intoxicating potion, which a certain sorceress, the abuser of love's name, carries about;) and how the first and chiefest office of love begins and ends in the soul, producing Far be it that I should write thee sin or blame, Whose bed is undefiled and chaste pronounced, The thoughts, and heart enlarges, hath his seat Book viii. v. 589, &c. Elsewhere he beautifully denominates smiles, "the food of love :" Book ix. v. 235, &c. Plato, who, it will readily be imagined, was a favourite with Milton, as he never fails to be with all who possess or can appreciate genius, has, in the Phædrus and Symposion, delivered in a highly poetical and beautiful manner, his ideas on the nature of love; rising from the reprehension of that which is most vicious, to the loftiest and purest yearning of soul towards soul. "There is no one so base," says he," as not to be inspired by love with a divine ardour for virtue, and rendered capable of contending in magnanimity with the noblest natures." To the question,-" What is love?" put by Socrates, Diotima, priestess of Venus, replies," Aaiμwv μέγας ὦ Σώκρατες ;- -"A mighty spirit, Socrates, which, like other da mons, is half human, half divine; and its power is that of an interpreter and mediator between heaven and earth, conveying aloft the vows and prayers of mankind, and revealing to mortals the commands and responses of the gods. He stands in the midst between God and man, and fills and binds together the several parts of the universe. All religious institutions proceed from him. He is the originator of sacrifices, rites, hymns, prophecy. The divine and human natures meet only in him; he is the channel through which, waking or sleeping, men hold communication with heaven; and * * t those happy twins of her divine generation, knowledge and virtue. With such abstracted sublimities as these, it might be worth your listening, readers, as I may one day hope to have ye in a still time, when there shall be no chiding; not in these noises, the adversary, as ye know, barking at the door, or searching for me at the bordelloes, where it may be while all others are esteemed mercenary and vulgar, he who exercises any of the ministries taught by love is regarded as the possessor of wisdom." But, to catch the spirit of Plato's doctrine, the whole dialogue must be read: (edit. Bekk. t. iv. p. 369–469,) and read, moreover, with the same feeling in which it was written. Among modern writers we know of none who have spoken of love more eloquently or philosophically than Baxter and Jeremy Taylor. "Therefore," exclaims the former, " He that hath made love the great command, doth tell us that love is the great conception of his own essence, the spring of that command; and that this commanded imperfect love, doth tend to perfect heavenly love, even to our communion with essential infinite love. Every place that I have lived in was a place of divine love, which there set up its obliging monuments. Every year and hour of my life hath been a time of love. Every friend, and every neighbour, yea, every enemy, have been the messengers and instruments of love."Dying Thoughts, p. 279, 280.-" Love," says Jeremy Taylor, "is infinitely removed from all possibility of rudeness; it is a thing pure as light, sacred as a temple, lasting as the world. The love that can cease was never true;' it is ourxía, so Moses called it; it is evvoia, so St. Paul; it is piλórns, so Homer; it is poppooúvn, so Plutarch: that is, it contains in it all sweetness and all society, and felicity, and all prudence, and all wisdom. For there is nothing can please a man without love; and if a man be weary of the wise discourses of the apostles, and of the innocency of an even and private fortune, or hates peace or a fruitful year, he hath reaped thorns and thistles from the choicest flowers of paradise; for nothing can sweeten felicity itself but love:' but when a man dwells in love, then the breasts of his wife are pleasant as the droppings on the hill of Hermon, her eyes are fair as the light of heaven, she is a fountain sealed, and he can quench his thirst, and ease his cares, and lay his sorrows down on her lap, and can retire home to his sanctuary and refectory, and his gardens of sweetness and chaste refreshments. No man can tell but he that loves his children, how many delicious accents make a man's heart dance in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges; their childishness, their stammering, their little angers, their innocence, their imperfections, their necessities, are so many little emanations of joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society: but he that loves not his wife and children, feeds a lioness at home, and broods a nest of sorrows; and blessing itself cannot make him happy. So that all the commandments of God enjoining a man to love his wife, are nothing but so many necessities and capacities of joy. She that is loved is safe; and he that loves is joyful.' Love is a union of all things excellent; it contains in it proportion and satisfaction, and rest and confidence; and I wish that this were so much proceeded in, that the heathens themselves could not go beyond us in this virtue, and its proper and appendant happiness.”—The Marriage Ring . Sacred Classics, vol. vii. p. 179–181. Select Sermons.—ED. has lost himself, and raps up without pity the sage and rheu matic old prelates, with all her young Corinthian laity, to in quire for such a one. Last of all, not in time, but as perfection is last, that care was ever had of me, with my earliest capacity, not to be negligently trained in the precepts of the Christian religion:* this that I have hitherto related, hath been to shew, that though Christianity had been but slightly taught me, yet a certain reservedness of natural disposition, and moral discipline, learnt out of the noblest philosophy, was enough to keep me in disdain of far less incontinences than this of the bordello. But having had the doctrine of holy scripture unfolding those chaste and high mysteries, with timeliest care infused, that "the body is for the Lord, and the Lord for the body;" thus also I argued to myself, that if unchastity in a woman, whom St. Paul terms the glory of man, be such a scandal and dishonour, then certainly in a man, who is both the image and glory of God, it must, though commonly not so thought, be much more deflouring and dishonourable; in that he sins both against his own body, which is the perfecter sex, and his own glory, which is in the woman; and, that which is worst, against the image and glory of God, which is in himself. Nor did I slumber over that place expressing such high rewards of ever accompanying the Lamb with those celestial songs to others inapprehensible, but not to those who were not defiled with women, which doubtless means fornication; for marriage must not be called a defile ment. Thus large I have purposely been, that if I have been justly taxed with this crime, it may come upon me, after all this my confession, with a tenfold shame: but if I have hitherto deserved no such opprobious word, or suspicion, I may hereby engage myself now openly to the faithful observation of what I have professed. I go on to shew you the unbridled impudence of this loose railer, who, having once begun his race, regards not how far he flies out beyond all * All Milton's biographers speak of the religious education he received. "It was at this early period of his life, as we may confidently conjecture, that he imbibed that spirit of devotion which actuated his bosom to his latest moment upon earth: and we need not extend our search beyond the limits of his own house for the fountain from which the living influence was derived."-Symmons' Life of Milton, 2nd edit. p. 53.—ED. truth and shame; who from the single notice of the Animadversions, as he protests, will undertake to tell ye the very clothes I wear, though he be much mistaken in my wardrobe: and like a son of Belial, without the hire of Jezebel, charges me "of blaspheming God and the king," as ordinarily as he imagines me to drink sack* and swear," merely because this was a shred in his common-place book, and seemed to come off roundly, as if he were some empiric of false accusations, to try his poisons upon me, whether they would work or not. Whom what should I endeavour to refute more, whenas that book, which is his only testimony, returns the lie upon him; not giving him the least hint of the author to be either a swearer or a sack-drinker. And for the readers, if they can believe me, principally for those reasons which I have alleged, to be of life and purpose neither dishonest nor unchaste, they will be easily induced to think me sober both of wine and of word; but if I have been already successless in persuading them, all that I can further say will be but vain; and it will be better thrift to save two tedious labours, mine of excusing, and theirs of needless hearing. Proceeding further, I am met with a whole ging of words and phrases not mine, for he hath maimed them, and, like a sly depraver, mangled them in this his wicked limbo, worse than the ghost of Deiphobus appeared to his friend Æneas. I scarce know them; and he that would, let him repair to the place in that book where I set them for certainly this tormentor of semicolons is as good at dismembering and slitting sentences, as his grave fathers the prelates have been at stigmatizing and slitting noses. By such handicraft as this what might he not traduce? Only that odour, which being his own must needs offend his sense of Young Hall, who was probably better read in Shakespeare than in the Ora manusque ambas, populataque tempora raptis Æneid. vi. 494, seqq.-ED Alluding to their cruel persecutions of the Puritans.-ED. smelling, since he will needs bestow his foot among us, and not allow us to think he wears a sock, I shall endeavour it may be offenceless to other men's ears. The Remonstrant having to do with grave and reverend men his adversaries, thought it became him to tell them in scorn, that "the bishop's foot had been in their book and confuted it," which when I saw him arrogate to have done that with his heels that surpassed the best consideration of his head, to spurn a confutation among respected men, I questioned not the lawfulness of moving his jollity to bethink him, what odour a sock would have in such painful business. And this may have chanced to touch him more nearly than I was aware, for indeed a bishop's foot that hath all his toes maugre the gout, and a linen sock over it, is the aptest emblem of the prelate himself; who being a pluralist, may under one surplice, which is also linen, hide four benefices, besides the metropolian toe, and sends a fouler stench to heaven than that which this young queasiness retches at. And this is the 'immediate reason here why our enraged confuter, that he may be as perfect a hypocrite as Caiaphas, ere he be a highpriest, cries out, "Horrid blasphemy!" and, like a recreant Jew, calls for stones. I beseech ye, friends, ere the brickbats fly, resolve me and yourselves, is it blasphemy, or any whit disagreeing from Christian meekness, whenas Christ himself, speaking of unsavoury traditions, scruples not to name the dunghill and the jakes, for me to answer a slovenly wincer of a confutation, that if he would needs put his foot to such a sweaty service, the odour of his sock was like to be neither musk nor benjamin? Thus did that foolish monk in a barbarous declamation accuse Petrarch of blasphemy for dispraising the French wines. But this which follows is plain bedlam stuff; this is the demoniac legion indeed, which the Remonstrant feared had been against him, and now he may see, is for him. "You that love Christ," saith he, "and know this miscreant wretch, stone him to death, lest you smart for his impunity." What thinks the Remonstrant? does he like Though wanting the power to persecute, Milton's adversaries, stung by his sarcastic eloquence, would gladly have employed against him the arguments of the Inquisition. This is seldom the feeling of persons who know themselves to be triumphant in controversy. Yet Mr. Mitford observes that |